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You Can Learn A lot from Bacon…

TODAY’S BUZZ TIP | February 24, 2009

Have you heard of the Bacon Explosion? Essentially two guys were looking to promote their BBQ site and decided to invent an over-the-top bacon recipe to draw attention. What happened next will soon become PR legend. The guys began by discussing the recipe on Twitter to an audience of over 1200 followers and then it spread like wild fire. Their site received 390,000 hits and the recipe became an internet sensation that was picked up by all major media including The New York Timesfrom which the following excerpt is derived:

Mr. Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion “got so much traction on the Web because it seems so over the top.” But Mr. Chronister, an Internet marketer from Kansas City, Mo., did what he could to help it along. He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking sites. “I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push it,” he said.

But Twitter was dwarfed by the impact of StumbleUpon, a networking site whereby over 7 million members recommend sites that they find interesting. One of Mr. Chronister’s followers waxed poetic about the recipe and as they say, the rest is PR history.

So what’s the lesson? Social media sites are extremely powerful especially if you know how to use them. And of course it helps if you have an extraordinary product or at least a highly unusual one. And in an age of eco friendliness and organic living, the fact that a 5000 calorie, fat laden recipe got this much attention is an extraordinary feat. Or perhaps we are all just pretending to eat healthy…whatever the case, bacon won.